Computers

What I have leanred today

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Some programs really have no bloody idea what the hell they are doing when it comes to paths.

Applying the oft’ used idea that once a disk is mounted, you can NOT unmount it without explicitly saying so, would actually be a nice option in Windows.

That The “Internet Options” in control centre (I got bored, so I took a look in CP lol), actually has *nothing* to do with the Internet what so ever, unless you believe that the entire Internet is Microsoft Internet Explorer ^_^.

Really, I don’t know what annoys me more, how often Microsoft’s attempts to “Integrate” shit seems to demonstrate pure stupidity, or just all the comedic prerequisite for a god complex!

Some times, I really wonder who thinks of all this crap: and what they were smoking at the time.

My first date with KDE 4.2.2

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Being someone who knows a few things, I decided that in order to be fair: I would generally hold off deciding whether KDE 4 is an improvement over KDE 3, until after KDE 4.2 was released. Well, as life has it, I’ve spent most of two days compiling KDE 4.2.2, and things went very smoothly (not that I liked compiling ocaml among the dependencies :-/). This is on my core workstation, running FreeBSD RELENG_7 (i.e. 7-STABLE).

My very first impression was… is this thing working??? All that first time setup takes a while to do, and without much sign of anything happening in the background. On the second boot up, after logging in through the X Display Manager (XDM), I counted 17 seconds until there was a usable desktop; but user interaction was clean all the way, no doubt about that this system was coming online. If you count the time it takes for korganizer and the other system tray icons to load, about ~45 seconds to get a full desktop — but it’s not far to count background programs like systray icons lol (especially the kind you’ll likely remove later).

Although I think the startup time shouldn’t be to bad for most people, I’ve forgotten how long it took to get a full KDE session going up, but I would say 17 sec is pretty good on my hardware hehe. With just a Sempron 3300+, even Blackbox and FVWM2 could start faster for my tastes, so no problem.

I find the new style K-Menu quite useful, takes a little getting used to – learning what adapts a focus follows mouse approach (the nav-icons on the bottom) and what requires a clickly click to work (most everything else). It is beyond me why it defaults to that behaviour (developer preference maybe?), but easy enough to make it a bit more consistent: right clicking the big K and going into the application launcher settings put the desired option right under my noise :-).

Obviously, the first thing I looked for was Konsole, the theme stuff on it is just awesome. Second thing was to dig up the run command dialog to get my urxvt+screen going. Further attempts to use the run dialog, proved that it was mostly a piece of krap. (Eye candy, but shitty to use; guess that is why there are terminal emulators.)

Closing the desktop folder viewer widget-thing was the third major action. Because I’m a person that hates having a desktop cluttered with icons (I prefer terminals :-), I like the idea very much, but since I have no immediate use for it, no need to have it taking screen realestate.

One thing that irked me, bringing up the help and control center entries on the applicaiton launcher (K-Menu?) loaded the ones from KDE 3.5.10, joy 8=). Oh wellk, it’s quite easy to remove or change them via the menu editor. In the case of khelpcenter, it seems it just finds the wrong documentation ^_^. Killing off the old thing and setting /usr/local/kde4/bin in PATH at the top of my ~/.xsession file, fixed access to the Control Panel. I must admit, I rather dislike KDE3 cruft in the menu – however you slice it

For years, I have wondered why some systems never turned on the NUMPAD by default, considering that I now do so much off a laptop; I can understand why, it’s a pain in the ass if when its unexpectedly on xD.

I generally feel that the whole Plasma and widget crazed stuff is a good element of KDE 4, but in all honestly, FVWM and Blackbox have just spoiled me something terrible.

It would appear, that KDE 4.2.2 is more or less ready for general usage, and unlike 4.0RC*, can actually be customized quite a lot to taste :-). For a little while, I was worried that Gnome might take the lead, and keep it… but I think by the time Gnome 3 hits, KDE 4 will be queen and king of the desktop environments, hehe. For those who desire eye candy, and have a machine capable of it; if you liked AERO, you ain’t seen nothing yet laddy. I think anyone who is still holding onto KDE 3 at home, should start migrating while the getting is good; and employ programming talent for bringing along any missing “Must haves” to the new desktop. I am not sure if it is really an improvement beyond the concepts, but hey, at least there is Okular!

The technologies that interest me most, are only Phonon and Kross — although I’m not likely to use either programming wise, beyond their stake in Qt (Qt has some form of Phonon, and has had a JavaScript’ish thing avail for awhile; and I wonder if kross will make it’s way in before Qt5, hehe)

As for me personally, well I’ve gone back to the Famous Virtual Window Manager version 2.5.27, old habits die hard 😉

Further testing of KDE 4.2.2 and later, will probably be through the Windows builds, rather then assaulting my poor stable laptop hehe.

The reasons I hate Firefox

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All OSes

Control over JavaScript is pitiful — NoScript should be stripped down and built into Firefox.

Controls over tabbed browsing is minimalist, in so far as notepad and ed are minimalist text editors; Last year I tried TabMixPlus on one machine and was annoyed that such a thing could be necessary, just for basic tabbing features. (Konqueror and Opera are much better then extensionless Firefox)

The default theme sucks, and good custom themes that have kept up with releases can be hard to find. On my last hunt, I laughingly ended up with a variant of the ‘first’ theme I ever setup, all the way back in Firefox 1.0.x !!!

Until recently the interface for managing ‘Applications’ to open stuff with, was usually useless; by until recently, I mean for a user who has been here sine 2004~2005; and old enough to know that the name and ‘logo’ has changed somewhat ^_^.

For years plugins have been a major pain; a plugin should never be able to crash the ENTIRE web browser, or worse! Render the entire web browser unresponsive — the ability to restore the users session is an excellent feature, not a band aid for the problem.

The ability to customize things is ridiculessly low, unless you want to get into themeing or add-ons; take a look at Konqueror, for a starting point on keybinding lol. I’m not even going to speak of Firefoxes interactive-scriptability…

On my Windows NT 5.1 machine, tested under Firefox v3.0.3, v3.0.6, and 3.0.9 tested; have never experienced this under BSD or GNU/Linux systems; but under Win32 the following also….

Images are about 3 times the size; if you go by dimensions in terms of window.resizeTo()’ing the browser window to match the on-screen size of the image.

Text is huge; I had to turn fonts down to size 10; SeaMonkey runs at 16 on the same machine, and the FreeBSD box uses the defaults.

Firefox initially refused to remember my home page in the preferences

Firefox blatantly refuses to accept ‘Show my home page’ on startup, and always ‘starts up’ with the ‘Show my windows and tabs from last time’ option. EDIT: seems to be doing it on unix as well; piece of shit web browser!!!

Firefox refuses to remember what size a window was when it closed; unlike previous versions have always done (in so far, as I have ever had to resize anything). In fact, I like Vimperator because *now* I can easily have Firefox resize itself on startup via JavaScript through .vimperatorrc.local, since the Windows version on my machine lacks the abilities of past Win, and all unix versions i’ve used :-/.

Except for the last three, I’d reckon the problems are because my Windows machine does not use the default DPI setting in Windows — if that causes a problem, I would consider that to be Mozilla’s problem and not Microshaft’s ;-).

Note: Over the past 10 years, it has not been uncommon for me to spend that many hours a day, surfing the World Wide Web; so I am not a total moron.

Imperialist or Vimperialist?

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I’ve begun testing the firefox extension “Vimperator”. I have become, should we say increasingly disatified with Firefox since the 2.0.0 release; so it has basically been pissing my off for the last 2 or 3 years ^_^.

All web browsers just suck, most are totally lame… Firefox, the 1.x releases were a great step up over IE5/IE6, but by modern standards Firefox 3.0.x is still lacking – it has not really evolved *all that much* past what it was so many years ago. The finaly piss in the bucket, was when Windows Firefox 3 proved to run more effectively on FreeBSD under WINE, then FreeBSD Firefox 3 on FreeBSD or Windows Firefox 3 on Windows NT 5.1. That, just popped the cork… lol. It’s my firm believe that a web browser, especially something as big, fat, and ugly as Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer — are seriously fucked in the head, if they require non-standard issue add-ons to make them useful.

Personally at the minimum, I think any browser that supports tabs and javascript; but lacks a _real_ way of managing tabs and security (think NoScript), is just !@%!%^^! retarded. Ok, that kills off the majority of web browsers ever created, doesn’t it?

Tonight, I installed Epiphany; and despite the unappealing appearance of the program, I actually found it superior to Firefox 3 after a few minutes of testing. The extensions package offering an interactive Python console, especially so. The standard JavaScript interface was fine I guess, but I would much prefer Python to JavaScript; because I know the language much better.

To give Firefox one last, and final chance… before I take a HEX EDITOR to the SON OF A ****, I’ve installed the Vimperator extension; in the hopes that the massive changes it makes, might redeem Firefoxes lameness. So far, it seems to be quite an improvement. The ability to navigate documents is much improved; most notably it now has *S* *A* *N* *E* tabbed browsing support, heck I’ve seen modeless editors with better tab support then standard Firefox, and that’s kinda sad. Access to JavaScript is much more readildy available (in a less ubtuse way), and bringing most of the Vi IMproved style stuff along, builds up issues solved by some add-ons, and not dreamed of yet by most “regular users”.

What can I say, I am no normal user — I spend inordinate amounts of time on and around computers. During that time, the programs I use most often include a terminal and command line intreptor (Windows is just moronic here, period), a text editor, various chat programs, and a web browser. Although there are countless people in this world, who use more of the web then I bother to explore: few people use their web browser more then I do, lol.

I chose Vi IMproved as my text editor, because it is quick, effieciant, and rewards the user with a tool that respects the most simple fact of any program solving a common problem: The user has more things in life to do then use this shitty program, so let’s make their life easier.

Why can’t a web browser do that also?

Interesting article

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Bjarne Stroustrup on Educating Software Developers

A very good read; it also reminds me why most of the pe

One thing that especially stuck a cord with me:

Education should prepare people to face new challenges; that’s what makes education different from training. In computing, that means knowing your basic algorithms, data structures, system issues, etc., and the languages needed to apply that knowledge. It also means having the high-level skills to analyze a system and to experiment with alternative solutions to problems. Going beyond the simple library-user level of programming is especially important when we consider the need to build new industries, rather than just improving older ones.

For the love of Pete’s sister, the education system in America hasn’t been preparing the vast majority of people for jack shit, for at least the last 40 years, if not the last 120 years…. and with the way things are these days, I wonder how long until someone will write a song for Coneheads II, where s/high school/college/gi is applied ^_^.

I still meet people that struggle with literacy and logic, let along engineering. When it comes to CS majors that I’ve met, I usually see two major varieties: those that went through a decent course, and actually paid attention. And those that probably got the turn your head and cough treatment, or spent more time playing Counter Strike.

:-/

Tech Support?

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http://www.cracked.com/article_17271_why-tech-support-sucks-look-behind-scenes.html

That’s why I only call Tech Support(tm) for HCFs, and not the stupid PEBKACs so many lusers call in, and screw things up for the rest of the world >>.

And this has got to be the best pic of a tech-support call result that I have ever laughed at xD

14 months from purchase to setup?

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Not so long ago a thread came up on DF, dealing with printing. That reminded me…. I baught my printer in what, February of 2007 and it’s just been gathering dust?

That’s gotta be a new record: for either laziness or being to fsckin’ busy lol.

The reason I bought it, I knew this model was usable with most OSes. Honestly, I _hate_ ink jet printers (and printers in general, but yeah… especially ink jets). Sadly, a decent PostScript printer is harder to find in this place then an affordable laser printer; having to use an inkjet makes me very happy that I rarely print anything.

Around OpenBSD 4.3 or so, I stripped off all printing related packages off my server: the shitmark hasn’t worked in years. So I had to setup the format filtering magic anew: ghostscript (no_x11 flavour), hpijs, foomatic-filters, and foomatic-db-hpijs. Several years ago it was my intention to run a networked printer off the box, but the printer I had at the time more or less stopped functioning under FreeBSD+CUPS, so I haven’t paid much attention since then. Most distributions use the Common Unix Print System (CUPS) these days; but I’m just old at heart, I like the Berkeley Line Printer Daemon (lpd). CUPS, only way I ever know wth is going on is going cross eyed with log files; with lpd, at least you know it’s brainlessly simple to sort out.

My only complaint about the printer, ‘lptest | lpr’ resulted in 2 pages of ~60 lines before I decided to dequeue the 200 line job: and the some-bitch isn’t smart enough to eject the darn 3rd sheet of paper ^_^. (whether this has to do with my PPD file or hpijs support for my printer is not interesting to me, lol). On top of that, the thing prints about as slow as I can write text by hand. I could just imagine if I fed tpsh’s ~3000 lines of text though it, probably take a week and 50 sheets of paper.

Worthless router

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Ended up woken up around 0930 (yippee, 3 hours sleep) due to a power outage; then dragged out shopping 🙁

When I got home and finally on the computer, I noticed for the first time in a LONG time my laptop couldn’t get a wireless connection: usually my BSD system is queen of the WLAN. A quick bit of investigation showed that during the power outage, the router reset itself totally. It’s a good thing my laptops Ethernet port has been supported since ~FreeBSD 6.4. Dug up an old Ethernet cable and plugged into the router. Sure enough the piece of crap got reset to factory defaults during the power outage stuff this morning.

Reconfigured the router and upgraded the encryption: only to find out my mothers PC couldn’t handle it, despite having the same hardware as my desktop. A quick search of Google turned up what I suspected, menu option added in an update; and her box was running XP Home SP2 / IE6 / .NET 1.1 lol. Updates are almost finished, and now every machines back on the network

My mothers been badgering me to try charters atypical power cycle suggestion: which I know could be done for years and years and wouldn’t change jack shit; she’s got no logical concept of networks. Some how, I think understanding helps troubleshoot stuff then trying the Microsoft Ritual Solution (MSRS). In my experience it works fine for Win32, but UNIX and networking equipment in general seems to follow a more sane pattern 😉

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine; The Jargon File, version 4.4.7

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

I always think about that old koan when having such trouble lol.